June 28, 2017

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

I am excited to watch the new Tupac Shakur’s biopic All Eyez on Me. Like many others, I can tell you that on September 14 1996, the day after Shakur’s death, I participated in a neighborhood wide memorial service via listening to Shakur’s music blasted through open windows or car speakers and giving props to those who made homemade memorial T-shirts demanding that Shakur rested in peace. Shakur was special to me because I was in seventh grade, severely bullied, and just mentioning Shakur’s name at school was a lifeline. Tupac Shakur was part of my initiation as a member of hip-hop culture. All Eyez on Me is the next film in a line of films with a critical investment in hip-hop culture as a site of truth telling, nostalgia, community, and as a lens for contemporary black life. This is especially pertinent in considering how hip-hop reflects the tumultuous American social-cultural landscape plagued by flaring anxieties about race and class. When protesters chant “Black Lives Matter,” it is often accompanied by heavy synthesizers, bass kicks, and volition via hip-hop.

In the “Hip-Hop Cinema” Close-Up for the latest issue of Black Camera 8.2 (Spring 2017), we centered hip-hop culture as a visual medium and not as an afterthought behind hip-hop music (rap). Kenton Rambsy’s discussion of the Jay-Z album American Gangster inspired by the movie starring Denzel Washington is an exciting use of the literary method text-mining to bridge hip-hop aesthetics on and off screen. Further, we looked to update the definition of “contemporary” hip-hop cinema to be inclusive of films produced in the last decade. I. Augustus Durham’s auto ethnographic analysis of “new blackness” via the film Dope and R. Boylorn’s discussion of progressive black masculinity in Ryan Coogler’s debut film Fruitvale Station break significant ground in situating hip-hop as a framework for newer conversations about race and gender in film. Still, some of the films we engaged are deemed “hood classics,” such as Casarae Gibson’s analysis of hip-hop and police brutality in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing or Adam Haupt’s discussion of white supremacy in hip-hop super group N.W.A.’s biopic Straight Outta Compton. Brandon Manning’s analysis of hood masculinities and vulnerability in Ice Cube’s screenwriting debut Friday and Peter Kunze’s article on the animated film BéBé’s Kids interrogates hip-hop’s influence on race and identity at the end of the 20th century.

Figure 01: Still of Frankie, Cleo, TeSean, and Stony after a robbery, from 'Set It Off' (Gray, 1996)

Figure 03. Still of Radio Raheem and his boom box, from 'Do the Right Thing' (Lee, 1989)

Figure 04. Still of NWA being detained on the street by police, from 'Straight Outta Compton' (Gray, 2015)

Figure 05. Still of Khalil rapping, from 'Bebe’s Kids' (Smith, 1992)

Figure 06. Still of Smokey and Craig on Craig’s porch,from Friday (Gray, 1995).

Ultimately, I hope our Close-Up encourages people to have more in-depth conversations about how hip-hop intersects capitalism, agency, and racial performance in popular culture. In an era where America’s racial and cultural ambiguity are pushed as a façade instead of a hard-earned possibility, we need new language and cultural context to do the work necessary to address the fallacies and realities black people face in this current social-economic and political climate.

Regina N. Bradley is Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University. Her work focuses on black popular culture, hip-hop, and the post-Civil Rights American South. She can be reached at www.redclayscholar.com.

June 13, 2017

We are excited to announce that the long-awaited special issue of Transition is now available on JSTOR! Transition, the international journal of politics, culture, and ethnicity, has partnered with the Pan-African writer’s collective, Jalada, to gather, support, and publish new writing talent.

Jalada 05 / Transition 123 was conceived in 2015 at the Writivism festival in Uganda, where Transition’s Managing Editor, Sara Bruya, met several members of the Jalada collective. From a mutual desire to collaborate, this issue on the theme of FEAR emerged as an opportunity to build on each other's strengths and access points to a global readership. Contributors were asked to reflect on our phobias, the things that make us human or, indeed, inhuman. Our fears, and the dance between fear and fearlessness, shape how we live, how we interact, and how we conceptualize ourselves and others. They shape the stories we tell.

To celebrate this special issue, read the following pieces for free!

Fear in the Age of DisplacementIshtiyaq Shukri expands upon intimate experiences of belonging and displacement in an enumeration of his fears for Africa and the world—from the mercenaries hired to bring “safety” to university campuses to the threats of terror and global warming in a “post-truth” era.

On Being an African IntellectualIn this 1970 essay, Transition founding editor Rajat Neogy criticizes those deemed African intellectuals by “notebook and pencil” visitors, distinguishing them from those Independence-era thinkers (himself included) who defended freedom of thought in the face of authoritarian suppression of dissent.

Fear and CourageTommie Shelby and Cornel West discuss alienation, fear, courage, and the power of movements in the black political tradition in the United States.

Damned. Gifts.“Missing mothers loom large. It took writing a poem for the mirror to finally reflect back and I saw Mama clearly.” A reflection by Wanjeri Gakuru.

Last Night In AsabaFiction from Chike Frankie. Edozien grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and loves traveling across Africa.

June 12, 2017

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

As I write this blog post, attorneys in a Hamilton County, Ohio, courtroom are fighting a Herculean battle to seat a jury in the retrial of Ray Tensing, a police officer charged with murdering an unarmed black motorist named Sam Dubose in Cincinnati during a traffic stop in July 2015. One of the more pointed questions the opposing sides of this legal battle will ask of prospective jurors concerns the potential jurors' opinions of the #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) movement. This line of questioning portends a number of pressing issues that persons outside the courtroom should consider as well. For instance, how are “opinions” of #BlackLivesMatter formed? Do said opinions reflect larger conceptions of race in America? How are such views colored by various mediatic representations? How do such attitudes circulate within and, at the same time, constitute contemporary discourses? And, perhaps most poignantly, of what relevance are the jurors' opinions on #BlackLivesMatter to the impending performance of their "civic duty" in this retrial? (Of note is the fact that Tensing’s first murder trial ended in a hung jury and apparently did not include this prevalent focus on #BLM.)

In our Close-Up on “#BlackLivesMatter and Media” in the latest issue of Black Camera (8.2, Spring 2017), Michele Prettyman Beverly, Alessandra Raengo, and I explore some of the essential questions above while also pursuing related avenues of thought. Our work traffics primarily in film, television, new/social media, and critical theory, but I hope that this journal issue will elicit further conversation on an extremely fertile and largely unexplored topic: the complex contemporary interactions between #BLM and innumerable forms of media. (For example, popular musicians such as Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and D'Angelo have recently produced provocative work that explicitly nods along to the rhythms of #BlackLivesMatter. Media like this deserves close analysis.) Being in part dependent upon contemporary media, #BlackLivesMatter moves in ways both analog and digital; it exists in public space, private space, and cyberspace; it lives on the street and on the screen. Put differently, #BLM inhabits rich mediatic lives. How those mediatic lives unfold—and how black lives continue to matter and not matter—must remain the subject of intense scrutiny both within media studies and in human activity more broadly conceived.

Chip Linscott has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts and teaches at Ohio University. His work focuses on blackness and media, and he has published a number pieces on film, social media, and music/sound.

December 07, 2016

Bernard Matambo’s article, "Working the City," has been awarded Editor’s Choice for Transition’s newest issue and can now be read for free at JSTOR.

Below, Bernard elaborates on how raising airfare to the States becomes a full-time occupation for two Zimbabwean students determined to study in the U.S.

In Transition 121, “Childhood,” Bernard Matambo offers a lyrical yet sobering account of the myriad challenges facing young Zimbabweans struggling to realize their dream of attending college in the United States. Raising money to pay airfare for the flights he reserves (and re-books each week to keep hope alive) becomes a pavement-pounding, full-time affair for a young student and his friend. Wearing his prom suit, and with a borrowed folder from the U.S. Embassy, he bluffs his way past security guards in banks and corporate offices to try to make his case directly to the executives he then wanders around to find.

Finding bittersweet humor in this earnest, yet potentially hopeless endeavor, the reader is left to wonder—did he ever make it to college in Ohio? Though not flagged as such in the issue, this piece is autobiographical, leaving us in the editorial office to want more of the story…

Transition: Toward the end of “Working the City” we read: “We have never actually discussed what we want of ourselves once we head off, what it is Cato and I want to achieve by leaving. But I assume it’s something good.” Can you reflect a bit (now that you are a college professor in Ohio) on what the leaving achieved? How would you advise that younger self, knowing what you know now?

Bernard: I think at that time leaving achieved a few direct and positive objectives. It allowed me to have access to a good education for one, one that allowed me to pursue a range of my academic interest, which included Writing. In that way, I was quite fortunate. Ironically too, by leaving I got to learn more about us as African people. Of course departure is accompanied by its own challenges. The piece in Transition is from a forthcoming book, where I explore this and a range of other themes that are not entirely disconnected.

I don't know if I would have any sound advice to my younger self. America has had its challenges, but it has also been kind to me. I had already been warned to moisturize well in winter, and not to assume that toothy smiles from strangers meant anything more than politeness. Image means one thing here, and another thing there; it has no fixed meaning or connotation. I suppose I would offer my younger self this.

Bernard Matambo is a Zimbabwean national and Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College. He has received residency fellowships from The Blue Mountain Center and the I-Park Foundation among others, and is one of Transition’s 2016 Pushcart Prize nominees.

Other authors in this cluster reflect on personal coming-of-age experiences: Bernard Matambo describes his determined fundraising tactics in the effort to leave Zimbabwe for college in the U.S.; Moraa Gitaa recalls idyllic days on the Kenyan coast with a friend whose family circumstances forced harsher realities on their paths to adulthood; Mbewane’s protagonist remembers his now-foreign homeland in a forgotten childhood photograph.

In addition, the issue features a sequel to Chris King’s 1998 article about the Nigerian democracy movement (Transition 77)—revealing details that were too dangerous to disclose at the time: chiefly, his and Wole Soyinka’s involvement in a plot to kill Sani Abacha.

IU Press: There are about 3.3 million Muslims in the United States, or roughly one percent. How does that compare to the percentage of Muslims in the military?

Edward Curtis: There are 4,000 or so service members who register their religious preference as Muslim with the Department of Defense. So, about one tenth of one percent of Muslims serve in the military. For comparison, this is similar to the percentage of American Jews who serve in the U.S. armed forces.

It may be that the military's dominant religious culture of Christianity discourages some religious minorities from joining, but there are obviously other economic, social, and political factors, too.

IUP: Your book is subtitled “Centuries of Service,” and that may come as a surprise to some people. Muslim Americans have come into the spotlight much more frequently recently, but your book points out that they have played a role in American culture since the very beginning. How have Muslim Americans served in the military?

EC: Before the twentieth century, Muslims often played supporting roles in the military. In the War of 1812, enslaved Muslim scholar Bilali Mahomet led a group of enslaved musket-bearing African Americans on Sapelo Island, Georgia, ready to defend the seacoast against British invasion. In the 1850s, Hadji Ali was recruited from the Middle East to help run Army Secretary Jefferson Davis' experiment to introduce camels into the military. In the Civil War, the jobs of Muslim soldiers were largely those of other African American people, though Sgt. Nicholas Said of the 55th Massachusetts (Colored) Infantry — one of the better educated Americans of any race — served as a clerk for a famous military doctor.

In the 20th century, there has been no job in the military that Muslims have not performed. As my book shows, they serve on the front lines as combat engineers, as members of infantry, as decorated pilots, public affairs officers, logistics specialists, as intelligence officers at Ft. Meade, as doctors, nurses, and medics, as chaplain and chaplain assistants, as sailors, as Air Force reserve human resource officers, you name it.

IUP: Speaking of Muslim Americans filling a variety of roles through all major combat operations, you tell a great story about a Muslim flight engineer and turret gunner named John Ramsey Omar, who served during World War II. In fact, people will be able to read that story as a short excerpt online. Are there any other stories that jumped out to you as you were working on this book that perhaps didn’t make the final cut?

EC: One great untold story is the service of Col. Doug Burpee, call sign ""Hadji," a Muslim Marine pilot who flew helicopters in Afghanistan. I wish that I could have asked him not only about the missions that he flew but also about how he views the ongoing conflict in what has become one of America's longest wars.

I had to write the book quickly. So what really jumped out at me were the number of leads that I didn't have time to track down. To give you one example, perhaps a thousand Muslims served during World War I. There is still so much to be written about them. Since their religious identity is not part of their military records, I had to find other historical records that would tell me something about just two of them, including oral histories, tombstones, deeds, and their social networks. I was lucky that I had already researched Muslims in North Dakota — buried in my files were photocopies of WPA interviews from the 1930s that happened to include some veterans. They've just been sitting there for years. I was able to use them in the book to depict the lives of these service members beyond what their military records told me. But I wonder what stories are still out there waiting to be told.

IUP: A recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that Americans have a lower opinion of Muslims than they do atheists. How have you found that Muslims in the military combat this stigma?

EC: It may be sad to say, but Muslim military members combat the stigma sometimes by remaining quiet when a fellow soldier insults them. They take a lot of grief, keep their head down, and try not to make a big deal of it. They try to prove their loyalty and value by being the best service member possible. Some file formal complaints against overt acts of discrimination.

The military reflects U.S. society, and so like America as a whole, there is both tolerance for and discrimination against Muslim service members. The culture of the military can be deeply Islamophobic. There is a lot of hazing, especially anti-Muslim name calling. Perhaps most painful for Muslim military members is the questioning of their loyalty to the United States. The difference between the military and American society more generally is that the military follows a chain of command. Since the Gulf War of 1991, some military leaders have often sought to accommodate and support Muslims under their command. The Pentagon has developed a core group of Muslim chaplains. Commanding officers sometimes employ Muslims to advise them on religious issues and to conduct cultural training for service members. Muslims are also being promoted up the ranks, which shows that the Department of Defense is serious about its commitment to the success of Muslim armed service members. When the commanding officer is a Muslim — as is the case with Col. Nashid Salahuddin — they are particularly sensitive to the religious minorities under their command. Other Muslim military members, especially those in small units deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, report that the intimate, life or death circumstances almost force non-Muslims to get to know their Muslim brother or sister in arms beyond stereotypes and misunderstandings.

IUP: As a follow up to the previous question, why would a Muslim even want to serve in the American military? What motivations do you find that this community has for offering up, in some cases, the ultimate sacrifice for a country that has a generally low opinion of that community?

EC: Muslim Americans want to serve for the same reasons that non-Muslims do. After 9/11, there was a spike of young Muslim Americans who wanted to serve in the military, sometimes to prove their loyalty to the country. Some Muslims say that their faith actually requires that they defend their nation — that this is a religious duty. But Muslims join for other reasons too. They hope to get their education paid for by the military, they need a job, they wish to see the world, and for some, they pine for adventure.

IUP: What sort of effect, if any, has this year’s presidential campaign had on the perception of Muslims in the military, if any?

EC: The first chapter of the book examines how two fallen Muslim soldiers — Kareem Khan and Humayun Khan — played important symbolic roles in the Presidential elections of 2008 and 2016. For the large percentage of Americans who hold anti-Muslim views — it is about 40 to 50% depending on the poll — the service of Muslims in the military does not make them question their points of view on the whole. But among Americans already sympathetic to the plight of Muslims in the country, it has solidified the idea that Muslims in uniform prove the promise of America: if you work hard and you serve the country, the country will honor you as one of its own. The blood sacrifice of these soldiers even redeems the idea of America.

Dave Gunning explains: "In recent years we have become familiar with the ways in which novelists have made use of the symptoms of dissociative disorder to create and elaborate their narratives. Whether exploring the uncanny doubles of multiple personality, or the memory loss of fugue states, these stories speak of origins in repressed psychological trauma. Within some traditional African belief systems, however, such mental states may be more readily explained through notions of spirit possession, or the actions of a malevolent force. What happens then when writers who move between African and British locations, and whose novels to do the same, use these narrative devices? And what becomes of each of the explanatory frameworks when they do so?

"This article from Research in African Literatures looks at how recent novels by Aminatta Forna, Helen Oyeyemi, and Brian Chikwava manipulate the image of dissociative symptoms, and how, by doing so, they upset some of our received notions of how traumatic experience is rendered in fictional narrative."

Check out this article and the other excellent contributions in volume 46.4 of Research in African Literatures!

The ready use of the word nigger in 1930s Hollywood comes as a shock to modern ears: production crews commonly referred to the black reflector on the set as a “nigger”; trade publications called movie theater balconies “nigger heaven”; fan periodicals like New Movie Magazine and Boy’s Cinema casually called Black characters “niggers” in plot synopses; and Hollywood glamour columnists referred to the deep brown fabrics worn by Vivien Leigh or Myrna Loy as “nigger-brown.” As Randall Kennedy has shown, the word nigger has been uttered variously as a provocation or compliment and with internalized antiblack prejudice or as an intraracial term of endearment, with deadly seriousness, or through the protective veil of satire or irony. But to many Black people, nigger is always an invective—one that symbolically encapsulates the force of American racism.

This article from our journal Film History examines classical Hollywood’s struggle over whether the word could be used onscreen, a battle centered at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), an organization the film industry formed in 1922 to fend off public outcry against its controversies.

January 20, 2015

"I consider my films forward movements, each one on a step to the next one."—Ava DuVernay

In the first issue in the sixth volume of Black Camera, we conduct an extended conversation with Ava DuVernay, founder of the distribution company African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement and director of the new film Selma (2014)*, I Will Follow (2010) and Middle of Nowhere (2012), the latter making her the first African American woman to win the Best Director Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Black Camera 6.1 also has at its center the feature called “Close-Up,” that takes an in-depth look at a particular filmmaker, film, or cinematic formation. Delphine Letort, a member of Black Camera’s Advisory Editorial Board, and a prominent media scholar at the University of Le Mans, France, edits this issue’s installment. In its far-ranging analysis of postcolonial filmmaking in francophone countries, Letort asserts, engages with “the interstices of transnational filmmaking as illustrated by the feature films of directors with a double culture, working either as second-generation filmmakers in France or as postcolonial subjects in or having emigrated from (North) African countries.” Included in this Close-Up examination are: Benjamin Stora’s piece on representations of the Algerian War of Independence by Algerian and French filmmakers; Tsitsi Jaji’s feature on Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako; Florence Martin considers the cultural stasis and women’s subjectivities in Tangier in The Wretched Life of Juanita Narboni; Isabelle Vanderschelden examines Tony Gatlif’s films about Romani diasporas in Europe; Jeanne Garane’s explores the “European delusion” in Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue (2012); Letort interrogates Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal (2001) that delimits the organizing utility of diaspora for French-speaking Africans and their African American counterparts; and finally Letort and Emmanuelle Cherel curate a pleasurable and meaningful gallery of images from the work of three Algerian women artists who unmask and disrupt the colonial past in modern day Algeria as characterized by architectural remnants in the urban landscape.

Also in this issue, Marilyn Yaquinto gives a compelling account of the contemporary relevance of the late Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), and Amy Corbin’s reconsideration of Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding (1983) in conversation with Killer of Sheep (1979) and To Sleep with Anger (1990). Finally, we include an interview with Erez Pery, Art Director of Israel’s Cinema South Festival, and three film reviews by Olivier Barlet in the Africultures Dossier, along with book reviews and archival news.

November 18, 2014

We all need a touchstone. Until the world of political leadership is populated—not even totally, but simply in the main—by leaders with a genuine love of humanity, demonstrable in their actions, the world cannot quite let Nelson Mandela go. The dance is anything but over.

—Wole Soyinka, Transition 116

December marks a year since the passing of Nelson Mandela—a man who was as much myth as flesh and blood. Transition 116 pays tribute to Mandela’s worldly attainments and to his otherworldly sainthood. This issue assembles Mandela’s staunchest allies—for whom he approached saintliness—as well as his most entrenched critics.

December 04, 2013

This issue of Black Camera begins the fifth year of publication and partnership with Indiana University Press. It also marks the fourth installment of Close-Up, a series devoted to a film, filmmaker, genre, or area of Black filmmaking. The first in the series addressed the seminal film Nothing But a Man (1964) by Michael Roemer and Robert Young; the second, Precious (2009) by Lee Daniels, followed by Teza (2008), by the Ethiopian-American Haile Gerima.

In this Close-Up, guest editor Terri Francis has assembled a compelling collection of essays, interview, programmatic statement, images, and commentaries about Afrosurrealism—a little understood, understudied, and elusive subject. Together they cohere to render comprehensible a Black surreal that “re-center[s] blackness at the core of surrealism and modernism, not as catalytic matter but as the manifestations of black artists’ own modalities.”

In addition, the issue includes three distinctive essays: First, Ellen C. Scott’s lead piece on the subversion by Black exhibitors of Hollywood studio promotional materials on Black spectatorship. Next, Toni Pressley-Sanon’s explication of the “act” of witnessing as liberatory in two films, Haitian Corner (1988) and l’Homme Sur le Quais / The Man by the Shore (1993) by Raoul Peck. And Joi Carr’s critique of the “perverse ideological structures about beauty” in Chris Rock’s controversial documentary Good Hair (2009).

Also included in this issue is an interview with Madeline Anderson, pioneering African American filmmaker whose documentary work contributed in no small measure to the development of a Black documentary tradition in the 1960s and 1970s.

Of no less interest, consider Wole Soyinka’s address, “A Name Is More Than the Tyranny of Taste,” from this year’s FESPACO, along with regular Africultures contributor Olivier Barlet’s assessment of FESPACO 2013 and Leah Kerr’s guest archival spotlight essay, “Collectors’ Contributions to Archiving Early Black Film.”